I used to use VirtualBox to run VMs on my development workstations. I’ve heard that more people are using QEMU to do similar things, but never had the time to figure out how to set it up. Now there is a tool that does it all for you:
I tried it a week back and there was a bug that would not let you install Windows without a SAP user account. With version 3.11, that bug is now fixed. On Arch Linux, its as easy to install as yay quickemu. Then you can do things like:
quickget windows 11
quickemu -vm windows-11.conf
I had recently purchased a Velocio PLC to evaluate, so needed a Windows VM to run their software. My VirtualBox installation has become very slow on my other workstation since I upgraded to 3, 4K monitors (not sure if it is related to the monitor resolution), so I needed a new solution anyway. Both Windows 10 and 11 VMs run the Velocio software fairly well.
Recently used quickemu to test a SIOT reported problem:
Tried to run Ubuntu and got:
[cbrake@ceres quickemu]$ quickemu -vm ubuntu-22.04.conf
Quickemu 3.15 using /usr/bin/qemu-system-x86_64 v7.0.0
- Host: Arch Linux running Linux 5.18 (ceres)
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor
- CPU VM: 1 Socket(s), 4 Core(s), 2 Thread(s), 16G RAM
- BOOT: EFI (Linux), OVMF (/usr/share/OVMF/x64/OVMF_CODE.fd), SecureBoot (off).
- Disk: ubuntu-22.04/disk.qcow2 (16G)
Looks unused, booting from ubuntu-22.04/ubuntu-22.04-desktop-amd64.iso
- Boot ISO: ubuntu-22.04/ubuntu-22.04-desktop-amd64.iso
- Display: SDL, virtio-vga, GL (on), VirGL (on)
- ssh: On host: ssh user@localhost -p 22220
- SPICE: On host: spicy --title "ubuntu-22.04" --port 5930 --spice-shared-dir /home/cbrake/Public
- WebDAV: On guest: dav://localhost:9843/
- 9P: On guest: sudo mount -t 9p -o trans=virtio,version=9p2000.L,msize=104857600 Public-cbrake ~/Public
- smbd: On guest: smb://10.0.2.4/qemu
qemu-system-x86_64: Display spice is incompatible with the GL context
- Process: Starting ubuntu-22.04.conf as ubuntu-22.04 (1506437)
Looking through my notes above, I tried the following:
quickemu -vm ubuntu-22.04.conf --display spice
And it worked – not sure why, but I got done what I needed to do quickly – thanks to my notes above. This is the power of good notes – you figure things out once and then re-use that knowledge.